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CONTENTS 

A Defence of Nonsense . . i 

A Defense of Useful Information 12 
A Defence of Rash Vows . .2$ 
A Defence of Farce . -57 

A Defence of Baby- Worship « 47 

A Defence of Slang . ... 55 
A Defence of Humility . . 64 

A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls . 75 

Maeterlinck 88 

On Lying in Bed .... 95 
The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 103 
A Tragedy of Twopence . .112 



[V] 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE 

This little volume, issued as a gift book 
for lovers of Mr. Chesterton's writings, is j 
made up from essays to be found in "The 
Defendant," "Varied Types," and "Tre- 
mendous Trifles." 



A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE 

THERE are two equal and eternal ways 
of looking at this twilight world of 
ours : we may see it as the twilight of even- 
ing or the twilight of morning; we may 
think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, 
as a descendant or as an ancestor. There 
are times when we are almost crushed, not 
so much with the load of the evil as with 
the load of the goodness of humanity, when 
we feel that we are nothing but the inher- 
itors of a humiliating splendour. But there 
are other times when everything seems 
primitive, when the ancient stars are only 
sparks blown from a boy's bonfire, when 
the whole earth seems so young and ex- 
perimental that even the white hair of the 
aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like 
almond-trees that blossom, like the white 
hawthorn grown in May. That it is good 



A Defence o> Nonsense 

for a man to realize that he is " the heir of 
all the ages " is pretty commonly admitted ; 
it is a less popular but equally important 
point that it is good for him sometimes to 
realize that he is not only an ancestor, but 
an ancestor of primal antiquity ; it is good 
for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, 
and to experience ennobling doubts as to 
whether he is not a solar myth. 

The matters which most thoroughly evoke 
this sense of the abiding childhood of the 
world are those which are really fresh, ab- 
rupt and inventive in any age ; and if we 
were asked what was the best proof of this 
adventurous youth in the nineteenth century 
we should say, with all respect to its por- 
tentous sciences and philosophies, that it 
was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. 
Edward Lear and in the literature of non- 
sense. " The Dong with the Luminous 
Nose," at least, is original, as the first ship 
and the first plough were original. 

[2] 



A Defence of Nonsense 

It is true in a certain sense that some of 
the greatest writers the world has seen — 
Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne — have 
written nonsense ; but unless we are mis- 
taken, it is in a widely different sense. 
The nonsense of these men was satiric — 
that is to say, symbolic ; it was a kind of 
exuberant capering round a discovered 
truth. There is all the difference in the 
world between the instinct of satire, which, 
seeing in the Kaiser's moustaches some- 
thing typical of him, draws them continu- 
ally larger and larger; and the instinct of 
nonsense which, for no reason whatever, 
imagines what those moustaches would 
look like on the present Archbishop of 
Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of ab- 
sence of mind. We incline to think that 
no age except our own could have under- 
stood that the Quangle-Wangle meant ab- 
solutely nothing, and the Lands of the Jum- 
blies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy 

[3] 



A Defence of Nonsense 



that if the account of the knave's trial in 
"Alice in Wonderland " had been published 
in the seventeenth century it would have 
been bracketed with Bunyan's "Trial of 
Faithful " as a parody on the State prose- 
cutions of the time. We fancy that if 
"The Dong with the Luminous Nose'* 
had appeared in the same period every one 
would have called it a dull satire on Oliver 
Cromwell. 

It is altogether advisedly that we 
quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's " Non- 
sense Rhymes." To our mind he is both 
chronologically and essentially the father 
of nonsense; we think him superior to 
Lewis Carroll. In one sense, indeed, 
Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We 
know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: 
he was a singularly serious and conventional 
don, universally respected, but very much . 
of a pedant and something of a Philistine. 
Thus his strange double life in earth and in 

[4] 



A Defence of Nonsense 

dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at 
the back of nonsense — the idea of escape^ 
of escape into a world where things are not 
fixed horribly in an eternal appropriate- 
ness, where apples grow on pear-trees, and 
any odd man you meet may have three legs. 
Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he 
would have thundered morally against any 
one who walked on the wrong plot of grass, 
and another life in which he would cheer- 
fully call the sun green and the moon blue, 
was, by his very divided nature, his one 
foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the 
position of modern nonsense. His Won- 
derland is a country populated by insane 
mathematicians. We feel the whole is an 
escape into a world of masquerade ; we feel 
that if we could pierce their disguises, we 
might discover that Humpty Dumpty and 
the March Hare were Professors and 
Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental 
holiday. This sense of escape is certainly 

[5] 



A Defence of Nonsense 

less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of 
the completeness of his citizenship in the 
world of unreason. We do not know his 
prosaic biography as we know Lewis 
Carroll's. We accept him as a purely 
fabulous figure, on his own description of 
himself: 

" His body is perfectly spherical, 
He weareth a runcible hat." 

While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is 
purely intellectual, Lear introduces quite 
another element — the element of the po- 
etical and even emotional. Carroll works 
by the pure reason, but this is not so strong 
a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the 
main has always regarded reason as a bit 
of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning 
words and his amorphous creatures not 
with the pomp of reason, but with the ro- 
mantic prelude of rich hues and haunting 
rhythms. 

[6] 



I 



A De.fence of Nonsense 

" Far and few, far and few, 
Are the lands where the Jumblies live," 

is an entirely different type of poetry to 
that exhibited in " Jabberwocky." Car- 
roll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, 
makes his whole poem a mosaic of new and 
mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with 
more subtle and placid effrontery, is always 
introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect 
into the middle of simple and rational state- 
ments, until we are almost stunned into 
admitting that we know what they mean. 
There is a genial ring of common sense 
about such lines as, 

" For his aunt Jobiska said * Every one knows 
That a Pebble is better without his toes,' " 

which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The 
poet seems so easy on the matter that we 
are almost driven to pretend that we see his 
meaning, that we know the peculiar diffi- 
culties of a Pobble, that we are as old travel- 
lers in the *' Gromboolian Plain " as he is. 

[7] 



A De^fence of Nonsense 

Our claim that nonsense is a new litera- 
ture (we might almost say a new sense) 
would be quite indefensible if nonsense 
were nothing more than a mere aesthetic 
fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever 
arisen out of mere art, any more than 
anything essentially reasonable has ever 
arisen out of the pure reason. There must 
always be a rich moral soil for any great 
aesthetic growth. The principle of art for 
art's sake is a very good principle if it 
means that there is a vital distinction be- 
tween the earth and the tree that has its 
roots in the earth ; but it is a very bad 
principle if it means that the tree could 
grow just as well with its roots in the air. 
Every great literature has always been alle- 
gorical — allegorical of some view of the 
whole universe. The " Iliad" is only great 
because all life is a battle, the " Odyssey" 
because all life is a journey, the Book of 
Job because all life is a riddle. There is 

[8] 



A Defence of Nonsense 

one attitude in which we think that all 
existence is summed up in the word 
"ghosts"; another, and somewhat better 
one, in which we think, it is summed up 
in the words *'A Midsummer Night's 
Dream." Even the vulgarest melodrama 
or detective story can be good if it ex- 
presses something of the delight in sinister 
possibilities — the healthy lust for darkness 
and terror which may come on us any night 
in walking down a dark lane. If, therefore, 
nonsense is really to be the literature of the 
future, it must have its own version of the 
Cosmos to offer; the world must not only 
be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it 
must be nonsensical also. And here we 
fancy that nonsense will, in a very unex- 
pected way, come to the aid of the spiritual 
view of things. Religion has for centuries 
been trying to make men exult in the 
** wonders" of creation, but it has for- 
gotten that a thing cannot be completely 

[9] 



A Defence of Nonsense 

wonderful so long as it remains sensible. 
So long as we regard a tree as an obvious 
thing, naturally and reasonably created for a 
giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at 
it. It is when we consider it as a prodig- 
ious wave of the living soil sprawling up to 
the skies for no reason in particular that we 
take off our hats, to the astonishment of the 
park-keeper. Everything has in fact another 
side to it, like the moon, the patroness of 
nonsense. Viewed from that other side, 
a bird is a blossom broken loose from its 
chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging 
on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat 
to cover a man from the sun, a chair an 
apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple 
with only two. 

This is the side of things which tends 
most truly to spiritual wonder. It is sig- 
nificant that in the greatest religious poem 
existent, the Book of Job, the argument 
which convinces the infidel is not (as has 

[10] 



A Defence of Nonsense 

been represented by the merely rational 
religionism of the eighteenth century) a 
picture of the ordered beneficence of the 
Creation ; but, on the contrary, a picture 
of the huge and undecipherable unreason of 
it. " Hast Thou sent the rain upon the 
desert where no man is?" This simple 
sense of wonder at the shapes of things, 
and at their exuberant independence of 
our intellectual standards and our trivial 
definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it 
is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and 
faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) 
are the two supreme symbolic assertions of 
the truth that to draw out the soul of things 
with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw 
out Leviathan with a hook. The well- 
meaning person who, by merely studying 
the logical side of things, has decided that 
"faith is nonsense," does not know how 
truly he speaks ; later it may come back to 
him in the form that nonsense is faith. 



A DEFENCE OF USEFUL 
INFORMATION 

IT is natural and proper enough that the 
masses of explosive ammunition stored 
up in detective stories and the replete and 
solid sweet-stuff shops which are called 
sentimental novelettes should be popular 
with the ordinary customer. It is not dif- 
ficult to realize that all of us, ignorant or 
cultivated, are primarily interested in mur- 
der and love-making. The really extraor- 
dinary thing is that the most appalling fic- 
tions are not actually so popular as that 
literature which deals with the most undis- 
puted and depressing facts. Men are not 
apparently so interested in murder and 
love-making as they are in the number of 
different forms of latchkey which exist in 
London or the time that it would take a 



A Defence of Useful Information 

grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the 
Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and 
useless truth which fills the most widely- 
circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits^ Science 
Sif tings, and many of the illustrated maga- 
zines, is certainly one of the most extraor- 
dinary kinds of emotional and mental pabu- 
lum on which man ever fed. It is almost 
incredible that these preposterous statistics 
should actually be more popular than the 
most blood-curdling mysteries and the most 
luxurious debauches of sentiment. To im- 
agine it is like imagining the humorous 
passages in Bradshaw's Railway Guide 
read aloud on winter evenings. It is like 
conceiving a man unable to put down an 
advertisement of Mother Seigel's Syrup be- 
cause he wished to know what eventually 
happened to the young man who was ex- 
tremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of 
cheap detective stories and cheap novel- 
ettes, we can most of us feel, whatever our 

[13] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

degree of education, that it might be possi- 
ble to read them if we gave full indulgence to 
a lower and more facile part of our natures ; 
at the worst we feel that we might enjoy 
them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or 
getting drunk. But the literature of in- 
formation is absolutely mysterious to us. 
We can no more think of amusing ourselves 
with it than of reading whole pages of a Sur- 
biton local directory. To read such things 
would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence ; 
it would be a highly arduous and meritori- 
ous enterprise. It is this fact which consti- 
tutes a profound and almost unfathomable 
interest in this particular branch of popular 
literature. 

Primarily, at least, there is one rather 
peculiar thing which must in justice be 
said about it. The readers of this strange 
science must be allowed to be, upon the 
whole, as disinterested as a prophet see- 
ing visions or a child reading fairy-tales. 

[14] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

Here, again, we find, as we so often do, that 
whatever view of this matter of popular 
literature we can trust, we can trust least 
of all the comment and censure current 
among the vulgar educated. The ordinary 
version of the ground of this popularity for 
information, which would be given by a 
person of greater cultivation, would be that 
common men are chiefly interested in those 
sordid facts that surround them on every 
side. A very small degree of examination 
will show us that whatever ground there is 
for the popularity of these insane encyclo- 
paedias, it cannot be the ground of utility. 
The version of life given by a penny novel- 
ette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, 
but it is at least more likely to contain facts 
relevant to daily life than computations on 
the subject of the number of cows' tails 
that would reach the North Pole. There 
are many more people who are in love than 
there are people who have any intention of 

[IS] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

counting or collecting cows' tails. It is 
evident to me that the grounds of this wide- 
spread madness of information for informa- 
tion's sake must be sought in other and 
deeper parts of human nature than those 
daily-needs which lie so near the surface that 
even social philosophers have discovered 
them somewhere in that profound and 
eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding 
other people's business which made great 
popular movements like the Crusades or 
the Gordon Riots. 

I once had the pleasure of knowing a 
man who actually talked in private life after 
the manner of these papers. His conversa- 
tion consisted of fragramentary statements 
about height and weight and depth and 
time and population, and his conversation 
was a nightmare of dullness. During the 
shortest pause he would ask whether his 
interlocutors were aware how many tons of 

rust were scraped every year off the Menai 

[i6] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

Bridge, and how many rival shops Mr. 
Whiteley had bought up since he opened 
his business. The attitude of his acquaint- 
ances towards this inexhaustible enter- 
tainer varied according to his presence or 
absence between indifference and terror. 
It was frightful to think of a man's brain 
being stocked with such inexpressibly profit- 
less treasures. It was like visiting some 
imposing British Museum and finding its 
galleries and glass cases filled with speci- 
mens of London mud, of common mortar, 
of broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. 
Years afterwards I discovered that this 
intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a 
poet. I learnt that every item of this multi- 
tudinous information was totally and un- 
blushingly untrue, that for all I knew he 
had made it up as he went along ; that no 
tons of rust are scraped off the Menai 
Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and 
Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's 

[17] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

brain. Instantly I conceived consuming 
respect for the man who was so circum- 
stantial, so monotonous, so entirely pur- 
poseless a liar. With him it must have 
been a case of art for art's sake. The joke 
sustained so gravely through a respected 
lifetime was of that order of joke which is 
shared with omniscience. But what struck 
me more cogently upon reflection was the 
fact that these immeasurable trivialities, 
which had struck me as utterly vulgar and 
arid when I thought they were true, imme- 
diately became picturesque and almost 
brilliant when I thought they were in- 
ventions of the human fancy. And here, 
as it seems to me, I laid my finger upon a 
fundamental quality of the cultivated class 
which prevents it, and will, perhaps, always 
prevent it from seeing with the eyes of 
popular imagination. The merely educated 
can scarcely ever be brought to believe 

that this world is itself an interesting place. 

[i8] 



A Defekce of Useful iNFORMAtioK 

When they look at a work of art, good or 
bad, they expect to be interested, but when 
they look at a newspaper advertisement or 
a group in the street, they do not, properly 
and literally speaking, expect to be in- 
terested. But to common and simple peo- 
ple this world is a work of art, though 
it is, like many great works of art, anony- 
mous. They look to life for interest with 
the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable 
assurance with which we look for interest 
at a comedy for which we have paid money 
at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate 
school of contemporary fastidiousness, the 
universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over- 
coloured picture, the scrawlings in circles 
of a baby upon the slate of night ; its starry 
skies are a vulgar pattern which they would 
not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and 
fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the 
holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, de- 
graded by art to its own level, they have 

[19] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

lost altogether that primitive and typical 
taste of man — the taste for news. By this 
essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure 
in hearing the mere fact that a man has died 
at the age of no in South Wales, or that 
the horses ran away at a funeral in San- 
Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths 
and politics of the world, numbers of the 
miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based 
primarily upon this love of something that 
has just happened, this divine institu- 
tion of gossip. When Christianity was 
named the good news, it spread rapidly, not 
only because it was good, but also because 
it was news. So it is that if any of us have 
ever spoken to a navvy in a train about 
the daily paper, we have generally found 
the navvy interested, not in those struggles 
of Parliaments and trades unions which 
sometimes are, and are always supposed to 
be, for his benefit ; but in the fact that an 
unusually large whale has been washed up 

[20] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

on the coast of Orkney, or that some lead- 
ing millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is 
reported to break a hundred pipes a year. 
The educated classes, cloyed and demoral- 
ized with the mere indulgence of art and 
mood, can no longer understand the idle 
and splendid disinterestedness of the reader 
of Pearsons Weekly. He still keeps some- 
thing of that feeling which should be the 
birthright of men — the feeling that this planet 
is like a new house into which we have just 
moved our baggage. Any detail of it has 
a value, and, with a truly sportsmanlike in- 
stinct, the average man takes most pleasure 
in the details which are most complicated, 
irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless 
to discover. Those parts of the newspaper 
which announce the giant gooseberry and 
the raining frogs are really the modern 
representatives of the popular tendency 
which produced the hydra and the were- 
wolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in 

[21] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

the Middle Ages were not interested in a 
dragon or a glimpse of the devil because 
they thought that it was a beautiful prose 
idyll, but because they thought that it had 
really just been seen. It was not like so 
much artistic literature, a refuge indicating 
the dullness of the world : it was an incident 
pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of 
the world. 

That much can be said, and is said, 
against the literature of information, I do 
not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it 
is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowl- 
edge, it unquestionably lies along with the 
rest of popular literature under the general 
indictment that it may spoil the chance of 
better work, certainly by wasting time, 
possibly by ruining taste. But these obvi- 
ous objections are the objections which we 
hear so persistently from every one that one 
cannot help wondering where the papers in 
question procure their myriads of readers. 

[22] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

The natural necessity and natural good un- 
derlying such crude institutions is far less 
often a subject of speculation ; yet the 
healthy hungers which lie at the back of the 
habits of modern democracy are surely 
worthy of the same sympathetic study that 
we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long 
dethroned and the intrigues of common- 
wealths long obliterated from the earth. 
And this is the base and consideration 
which I have to offer : that perhaps the 
taste for shreds and patches of journalistic 
science and history is not, as is continually 
asserted, the vulgar and senile curiosity of 
a people that has grown old, but simply the 
babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a 
people still young and entering history for 
the first time. In other words, I suggest that 
they only tell each other in magazines the 
same kind of stories of commonplace por- 
tents and conventional eccentricities which, 
in any case, they would tell each other in 

[23] 



A Defence of Useful Information 

taverns. Science itself is only the exag- 
geration and specialization of this thirst for 
useless fact, which is the mark of the youth 
of man. But science has become strangely 
separated from the mere news and scandal 
of flowers and birds ; men have ceased to 
see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and 
natural as a flower, that a flower is as mon- 
trous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of 
this bridge between science and human na- 
ture is one of the greatest needs of man- 
kind. We have all to show that before we 
go on to any visions or creations we can be 
contented with a planet of miracles. 



[24] 



A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS 

IF a prosperous modern man, with a high 
hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly 
pledge himself before all his clerks and 
friends to count the leaves on every third 
tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City 
on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the 
whole of Mill's '' Liberty" seventy-six 
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields 
belonging to any one of the name of Brown, 
to remain for thirty-one hours holding his 
left ear in his right hand, to sing the names 
of all his aunts in order of age on the top 
of an omnibus, or make any such unusual 
undertaking, we should immediately con- 
clude that the man was mad, or, as it is 
sometimes expressed, was "an artist in 
life." Yet these vows are not more extra- 
ordinary than the vows which in the Middle 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

Ages and in similar periods were made, 
not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest 
figures in civic and national civilization — 
by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One 
man swore to chain two mountains to- 
gether, and the great chain hung there, it 
was said, for ages as a monument of that 
mystical folly. Another swore that he 
would find his way to Jerusalem with a 
patch over his eyes, and died looking for 
it. It is not easy to see that these two ex- 
ploits, judged from a strictly rational stand- 
point, are any saner than the acts above 
suggested. A mountain is commonly a 
stationary and reliable object which it is 
not necessary to chain up at night like a 
dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see 
that a man pays a very high compliment to 
the Holy City by setting out for it under 
conditions which render it to the last de- 
gree improbable that he will ever get there. 
But about this there is one striking thing 

[26] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

to be noticed. If men behaved in that way 
in our time, we should, as we have said, 
regard them as symbols of the *' de- 
cadence." But the men who did these 
things were not decadent ; they belonged 
generally to the most robust classes of what 
is generally regarded as a robust age. 
Again, it will be urged that if men essen- 
tially sane performed such insanities, it was 
under the capricious direction of a super- 
stitious religious system. This, again, will 
.not hold water ; for in the purely terrestrial 
and even sensual departments of life, such 
as love and lust, the mediaeval princes show 
\the same mad promises and performances, 
the same misshapen imagination and the 
same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we 
have a contradiction, to explain which it is 
necessary to think of the whole nature of 
vows from the beginning. And if we con- 
sider seriously and correctly the nature of 
vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, 

[27] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

come to the conclusion that it is perfectly 
sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain 
mountains together, and that, if insanity is in- 
volved at all, it is a little insane not to do so. 
The man who makes a vow makes an 
appointment with himself at some distant 
time or place. The danger of it is that 
himself should not keep the appointment. 
And in modern times this terror of one's 
self, of the weakness and mutability of 
one's self, has perilously increased, and is 
the real basis of the objection to vows of 
any kind. A modern man refrains from 
swearing to count the leaves on every third 
tree in Holland Walk, not because it is 
silly to do so (he does many sillier things), 
but because he has a profound conviction 
that before he had got to the three hundred 
and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he 
would be excessively tired of the subject 
and want to go home to tea. In other 
words, we fear that by that time he will be, 

[28] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

in the common but hideously significant 
phrase, another man. Now, it is this hor- 
rible fairy-tale of a man constantly changing 
into other men that is the soul of the de- 
cadence. That John Paterson should, with 
apparent calm, look forward to being a cer- 
tain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Mac- 
gregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs 
on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thurs- 
day, may seem a nightmare ; but to that 
nightmare we give the name of modern 
culture. One great decadent, who is now 
dead, published a poem some time ago, in 
which he powerfully summed up the whole 
spirit of the movement by declaring that he 
could stand in the prison yard and entirely 
comprehend the feelings of a man about to 
be hanged : 

" For he that lives more lives than one 
More deaths than one must die." 

And the end of all this is that maddening 
horror of unreality which descends upon 

[29] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

the decadents, and compared with which 
physical pain itself would have the freshness 
of a youthful thing. The one hell which 
imagination must conceive as most hellish 
is to be eternally acting a play without even 
the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in 
which to be human. And this is the con- 
dition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of 
the free-lover. To be everlastingly pass- 
ing through dangers which we know cannot 
scathe us, to be taking oaths which we 
know cannot bind us, to be defying ene- 
mies who we know cannot conquer us — 
this is the grinning tyranny of decadence 
which is called freedom. 

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the 
maker of vows. The man who made a 
vow, however wild, gave a healthy and 
natural expression to the greatness of a 
great moment. He vowed, for example, 
to chain two mountains together, perhaps 
a symbol of some great relief, or love, or 

[30] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

aspiration. Short as the moment of his 
resolve might be, it was, like all great mo-^ 
ments, a moment of immortality, and the 
desire to say of. it exegi monumentum cere 
perennius was the only sentiment that would 
satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic 
man would, of course, easily see the emo- 
tional opportunity ; he would vow to chain 
two mountains together. But, then, he 
would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the 
earth to the moon. And the withering 
consciousness that he did not mean what 
he said, that he was, in truth, saying noth- 
ing of any great import, would take from 
him exactly that sense of daring actuality 
which is the excitement of a vow. For 
what could be more maddening than an ex- 
istence in which our mother or aunt re- 
ceived the information that we were going 
to assassinate the King or build a temple 
on Ben Nevis with the genial composure 
of custom ? 

[31] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

The revolt against vows has been carried 
in our day even to the extent of a revolt 
against the typical vow of marriage. It is 
most amusing to listen to the opponents of 
marriage on this subject. They appear to 
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a 
yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by 
the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke 
consistently imposed by all lovers on them- 
selves. They have invented a phrase, a 
phrase that is a black and white contradic- 
tion in two words — "free-love" — as if a 
lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. 
It is the nature of love to bind itself, and 
the institution of marriage merely paid the 
average man the compliment of taking him 
at his word. Modern sages offer to the 
lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest 
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility ; 
but they do not respect him as the old 
Church respected him ; they do not write 
his oath upon the heavens, as the record of 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

his highest moment. They give him every 
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, 
which is the only one that he wants. 

In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play 
" The Philanderer," we have a vivid picture 
of this state of things. Charteris is a man 
perpetually endeavouring to be a free-lover, 
which is like endeavouring to be a married 
bachelor or a white negro. He is wander- 
ing in a hungry search for a certain exhila- 
ration which he can only have when he has 
the courage to cease from wandering. 
Men knew better than this in old times — 
in the time, for example, of Shakespeare's 
heroes. When Shakespeare's men are 
really celibate they praise the undoubted 
advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsi- 
bility, a chance of continual change. But 
they were not such fools as to continue to 
talk of liberty when they were in such a 
condition that they could be made happy 
or miserable by the moving of some one 

[33] 



I 



A Defence of Rash Vows , 

else's eyebrow. Suckling classes love with 
debt in his praise of freedom. 

" And he that's fairly out of both 
Of all the world is blest. 
He lives as in the golden age, 
When all things made were common; 
He takes his pipe, he takes his glass, 
He fears no man or woman." 

This is a perfectly possible, rational and 
manly position. But what have lovers to 
do with ridiculous affectations of fearing 
no man or woman } They know that in 
the turning of a hand the whole cosmic en- 
gine to the remotest star may become an 
instrument of music or an instrument of 
torture. They hear a song older than 
Suckling's, that has survived a hundred 
philosophies. ** Who is this that looketh 
out of the window, fair as the sun, clear 
as the moon, terrible as an army with ban- 
ners } " 

As we have said, it is exactly this back- 

[34] 



A Defence of Rash Vows 

door, this sense of having a retreat behind 
us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing 
spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere 
there is the persistent and insane attempt 
to obtain pleasure without paying for it. 
Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes prac- 
tically say, ^' Let us have the pleasures of 
conquerors without the pains of soldiers : 
let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race." 
Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent 
mystics say : '' Let us have the fragrance of 
sacred purity without the sorrows of self- 
restraint ; let us sing hymns alternately to 
the Virgin and Priapus." Thus in love the 
free-lovers say: " Let us have the splen- 
dour of offering ourselves without the peril 
of committing ourselves ; let us see whether 
one cannot commit suicide an unlimited 
number of times." 

Emphatically it will not work. There 
are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the 
spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete ; 

[35] 



A Defence op Rash Vows 

but there is one thrill that is known only 
to the soldier who fights for his own flag, 
to the ascetic who starves himself for his 
own illumination, to the lover who makes 
finally his own choice. And it is this trans- 
figuring self-discipline that makes the vow 
a trul}' sane thing. It must have satisfied 
even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover 
or a poet to know that in consequence of 
some one instant of decision that strange 
chain would hang for centuries in the Alps 
among the silences of stars and snows. All 
around us is the city of small sins, abound- 
ing in backways and retreats, but surely, 
sooner or later, the towering flame will rise 
from the harbour announcing that the reign 
of the cowards is over and a man is burn- 
ing his ships. 



- [36] 



A DEFENCE OF FARCE 

I HAVE never been able to understand 
why certain forms of art should be 
marked off as something debased and 
trivial. A comedy is spoken of as '* de- 
generating into farce " ; it would be fair 
criticism to speak of it ''changing into 
farce"; but as for degenerating into farce, 
we might equally reasonably speak of it 
as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a 
story is spoken of as " melodramatic," and 
the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as 
a compliment. To speak of something as 
"pantomimic" or "sensational" is inno- 
cently supposed to be biting, heaven 
knows why, for all works of art are sensa- 
tions, and a good pantomime (now extinct) 
is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. 
^'This stuff is fit for a detective story," is 



t 



A Defence of Farce 

often said, as who should say, '* This stuff 
is fit for an epic." 

Whatever may be the rights and wrongs 
of this mode of classification, there can be 
no doubt about one most practical and 
disastrous effect of it. These lighter or 
wilder forms of art, having no standard set 
up for them, no gust of generous artistic 
pride to lift them up, do actually tend to 
become as bad as they are supposed to be. 
Neglected children of the great mother, 
they grow up in darkness, dirty and un- 
lettered, and when they are right they are 
right almost by accident, because of the 
blood in their veins. The common detect- 
ive story of mystery and murder seems to 
the intelligent reader to be little except a 
strange glimpse of a planet peopled by con- 
genital idiots, who cannot find the end of 
their own noses or the character of their 
own wives. The common pantomime seems 
like some horrible satiric picture of a world 

[38] 



A Defence of Farce 

without cause or effect, a mass of "jarring 
atoms," a prolonged mental torture of irrele- 
vancy. The ordinary farce seems a world 
of almost piteous vulgarity, where a half- 
witted and stunted creature is afraid when 
his wife comes home, and amused when she 
sits down on the door-step. All this is, in 
a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing 
in heaven or earth except the attitude and 
the phrases quoted at the beginning of this 
article. We have no doubt in the world 
that, if the other forms of art had been 
equally despised, they would have been 
equally despicable. If people had spoken 
of "sonnets" with the same accent with 
which they speak of " music-hall songs," a 
sonnet would have been a thing so fearful 
and wonderful that we almost regret we 
cannot have a specimen ; a rowdy sonnet is 
a thing to dream about. If people had said 
that epics were only fit for children and nurse- 
maids, " Paradise Lost" might have been 

[39] 



A Defence of Farce 

an average pantomime : it might have been 
called " Harlequin Satan, or How Adam 'Ad 
'Em." For who would trouble to bring to 
perfection a work in which even perfection 
is grotesque ? Why should Shakespeare 
write "Othello" if even his triumph con- 
sisted in the eulogy, " Mr. Shakespeare is fit 
for sogiething better than writing tragedies"? 
The case of farce, and its wilder embodi- 
ment in harlequinade, is especially im- 
portant. That these high and legitimate 
forms of art, glorified by Aristophanes and 
Moli^re, have sunk into such contempt 
may be due to many causes : I myself have 
little doubt that it is due to the astonishing 
and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and 
hilarity which marks modern aesthetics, to 
such an extent that it has spread even to 
the revolutionists (once the hopeful section 
of men), so that even those who ask us to 
fling the stars into the sea are not quite 
sure that they will be any better there than 

[40] 



A Defence of Farce 

they were before. Every form of literary 
art must be a symbol of some phase of the 
human spirit ; but whereas the phase is, in 
human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, 
in art it must have a certain pungency and 
neatness of form, to compensate for its lack 
of reality. Thus any set of young people 
rou.id a tea-table may have all the comedy 
emotions of " Much Ado about Nothing" 
or" Northanger Abbey," but if their actual 
conversation were reported, it would pos- 
sibly not be a worthy addition to litera- 
tire. An old man sitting by his fire may 
have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or 
P6re Goriot, but if he comes into literature 
(le must do something besides sit by the 
^.re. The artistic justification, then, of 
farce and pantomime must consist in the 
emotions of life which correspond to them. 
And these emotions are to an incredible 
extent crushed out by the modern insistence 
on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is 

[41] 



A Defence of Farce 

said, is the dominant element of life ; but 
this is true only in a very special sense. If 
pain were for one single instant literally 
the dominant element in life, every man 
would be found hanging dead from his own 
bed-post by the morning. Pain, as the 
black and catastrophic thing, attracts the 
youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws 
devils and skeletons and men hanging. 
But joy is a far more elusive and ehish 
matter, since it is our reason for existing, 
and a very feminine reason ; it mingjes 
with every breath we draw and every cip 
of tea we drink. The literature of joy s 
infinitely more difficult, more rare and mor? 
triumphant than the black and white litera- 
ture of pain. And of all the varied forms 
of the literature of joy, the form most truly 
worthy of moral reverence and artistic am- 
bition is the form called "farce" — or its 
wilder shape in pantomime. 
To the quietest human being, seated in 



A Defence of Farce 

the quietest house, there will sometimes 
come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for 
the possibilities or impossibilities of things; 
he will abruptly wonder whether the tea- 
pot may not suddenly begin to pour out 
honey or sea-water, the clock to point to 
all hours of the day at once, the candle to 
burn green or crimson, the door to open 
upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a 
London street. Upon any one who feels 
this nameless anarchism there rests for the 
time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. 
Of the clown who cuts the policeman in 
two it may be said (with no darker mean- 
ing) that he realizes one of our visions. 
And it may be noted here that this internal 
quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized 
and preserved by that commonplace or 
cockney landscape and architecture which 
characterizes pantomime and farce. If the 
whole affair happened in some alien atmos- 
phere, if a pear-tree began to grow apples 

[ 43 ] 



A Defence of Farce 

or a river to run with wine in some strange 
fairy-land, the effect would be quite different. 
The streets and shops and door-knockers 
of the harlequinade, which to the vulgar aes- 
thete make it seem commonplace, are in truth 
the very essence of the aesthetic departure. 
It must be an actual modern door which 
opens and shuts, constantly disclosing dif- 
ferent interiors ; it must be a real baker 
whose loaves fly up into air without his 
touching them, or else the whole internal 
excitement of this elvish invasion of civili- 
zation, this abrupt entrance of Puck into 
Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when 
the present narrow phase of aesthetics has 
ceased to monopolize the name, the glory 
of a farcical art may become fashionable. 
Long after men have ceased to drape their 
houses in green and gray and to adorn 
them with Japanese vases, an aesthete may 
build a house on pantomime principles, in 
which all the doors shall have their bells 

[44] 



A Defence of Farce 

and knockers on the inside, all the stair- 
cases be constructed to vanish on the 
pressing of a button, and all the dinners 
(humorous dinners in themselves) come 
up cooked through a trap-door. We are 
very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable 
to regulate one's life and lodgings by this 
kind of art as by any other. 

The whole of this view of farce and 
pantomime may seem insane to us ; but we 
fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing 
in this strange age of transition is so de- 
pressing as its merriment. All the most 
brilliant men of the day when they set 
about the writing of comic literature do it 
under one destructive fallacy and disad- 
vantage : the notion that comic literature 
is in some sort of way superficial. They 
give us little knickknacks of the brittleness 
of which they positively boast, although 
two thousand years have beaten as vainly 
upon the follies of the " Frogs " as on 

[45] 



A Defence of Farce 

the wisdom of the *' Republic." It is all a 
mean shame of joy. When we come out 
from a performance of the " Midsummer 
Night's Dream " we feel as near to the 
stars as when we come out from *' King 
Lear." For the joy of these works is older 
than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than 
wisdom, their love is stronger than death. 

The old masters of a healthy madness, 
Aristophanes or Rabelais or Shakespeare, 
doubtless had many brushes with the pre- 
cisians or ascetics of their day, but we 
cannot but feel that for honest severity 
and consistent self-maceration they would 
always have had respect. But what abysses 
of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, 
would they have reserved for an aesthetic 
type and movement which violated morality 
and did not even find pleasure, which out- 
raged sanity and could not attain to exuber- 
ance, which contented itself with the fool's 
cap without the bells 1 

[46] 



A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP 

THE two facts which attract almost 
every normal person to children are, 
first, that they are very serious, and, 
secondly, that they are in consequence 
very happy. They are jolly with the com- 
pleteness which is possible only in the ab- 
sence of humour. The most unfathomable 
schools and sages have never attained to 
the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a 
baby of three months old. It is the gravity 
of astonishment at the universe, and as- 
tonishment at the universe is not mysticism, 
but a transcendent common sense. The 
fascination of children lies in this : that with 
each of them all things are remade, and the 
universe is put again upon its trial. As we 
walk the streets and see below us those de- 
lightful bulbous heads, three times too big 



A Defence of Baby-Worship 

for the body, which mark these human 
mushrooms, we ought always primarily to 
remember that within every one of these 
heads there is a new universe, as new as 
it was on the seventh day of creation. In 
each of those orbs there is a new sys- 
tem of stars, new grass, new cities, a new 
sea. 

There is always in the healthy mind an 
obscure prompting that religion teaches us 
rather to dig than to climb ; that if we could 
once understand the common clay of earth 
we should understand everything. Simi- 
larly, we have the sentiment that if we could 
destroy custom at a blow and see the stars 
as a child sees them, we should need no 
other apocalypse. This is the great truth 
which has always lain at the back of baby- 
worship, and which will support it to the 
end. Maturity, with its endless energies 
and aspirations, may easily be convinced 
that it will find new things to appreciate ; 

[48] 



A Defence of Baby!-Worship 

but it will never be convinced, at bottom, 
that it has properly appreciated virhat it has 
got. We may scale the heavens and find 
new stars innumerable, but there is still the 
new star we have not found — that on which 
we were born. 

But the influence of children goes further 
than its first trifling effort of remaking 
heaven and earth. It forces us actually to 
remodel our conduct in accordance with 
this revolutionary theory of the marvellous- 
ness of all things. We do (even when we 
are perfectly simple or ignorant) — we do 
actually treat talking in children as marvel- 
lous, walking in children as marvellous, 
common intelligence in children as marvel- 
lous. The cynical philosopher fancies he 
has a victory in this matter — that he can 
laugh when he shows that the words or an- 
tics of the child, so much admired by its wor- 
shippers, are common enough. The fact is 
that this is precisely where baby-worship is 

[49] 



A Defence of Baby-Worship 

so profoundly right. Any words and any 
antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, 
the child's words and antics are wonder- 
ful, and it is only fair to say that the 
philosopher's words and antics are equally 
wonderful. 

The truth is that it is our attitude towards 
children that is right, and our attitude 
towards grown-up people that is wrong. 
Our attitude towards our equals in age con- 
sists in a servile solemnity, overlying a con- 
siderable degree of indifference or disdain. 
Our attitude towards children consists in a 
condescending indulgence, overlying an un- 
fathomable respect. We bow to grown 
people, take off our hats to them, refrain 
from contradicting them flatly, but we do 
not appreciate them properly. We make 
puppets of children, lecture them, pull their 
hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. 
When we reverence anything in the mature, 
it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this 

[50] 



A Defence of Baby-Worship 

is an easy matter. But we reverence the 
faults and follies of children. 

We should probably come considerably 
nearer to the true conception of things if 
we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles 
and types, with precisely that dark affection 
and dazed respect with which we treat the 
infantile limitations. A child has a diffi- 
culty in achieving the miracle of speech, 
consequently we find his blunders almost as 
marvellous as his accuracy. If we only 
adopted the same attitude towards Premiers 
and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we 
genially encouraged their stammering and 
delightful attempts at human speech, we 
should be in a far more wise and tolerant 
temper. A child has a knack of making 
experiments in life, generally healthy in mo- 
tive, but often intolerable in a domestic 
commonwealth. If we only treated all 
commercial buccaneers and bumptious ty- 
rants on the same terms, if we gently 

[SI] 



A Defence of Baby-Worship 

chided their brutalities as rather quaint mis- 
takes in the conduct of life, if we simply 
told them that they would '* understand 
when they were older," we should probably 
be adopting the best and most crushing 
attitude towards the weaknesses of hu- 
manity. In our relations to children we 
prove that the paradox is entirely true, that 
it is possible to combine an amnesty that 
verges on contempt with a worship that 
verges upon terror. We forgive children 
with the same kind of blasphemous gentle- 
ness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the 
Omnipotent. 

The essential rectitude of our view of 
children lies in the fact that we feel them 
and their ways to be supernatural while, for 
some mysterious reason, we do not feel our- 
selves or our own ways to be supernatural. 
The very smallness of children makes it 
possible to regard them as marvels ; we 
seem to be dealing with a new race, only to 

[52 J 



A Defence of Baby-Worship 

be seen through a microscope. I doubt if 
any one of any tenderness or imagination 
can see the hand of a child and not be a little 
frightened of it. It is awful to think of the 
essential human energy moving so tiny a 
thing ; it is like imagining that human na- 
ture could live in the wing of a butterfly or 
the leaf of a tree. When we look upon 
lives so human and yet so small, we feel as 
if we ourselves were enlarged to an embar- 
rassing bigness of stature. We feel the same 
kind of obligation to these creatures that a 
deity might feel if he had created something 
that he could not understand. 

But the humorous look of children is 
perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds 
that hold the Cosmos together. Their top- 
heavy dignity is more touching than any 
humility ; their solemnity gives us more 
hope for all things than a thousand carnivals 
of optimism ; their large and lustrous eyes 
seem to hold all the stars in their astonish- 

[53] 



I 

A Defence of Baby-Worship 

ment ; their fascinating absence of nose 
seems to give to us the most perfect hint of 
the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of 
heaven. 






[54] 



A DEFENCE OF SLANG 

THE aristocrats of the nineteenth cen- 
tury have destroyed entirely their 
one solitary utility. It is their business to 
be flaunting and arrogant ; but they flaunt 
unobtrusively, and their attempts at arro- 
gance are depressing. Their chief duty 
hitherto has been the development of 
variety, vivacity, and fullness of life ; oli- 
garchy was the w^orld's first experiment in 
liberty. But now they have adopted the 
opposite ideal of " good form," which may 
be defined as Puritanism without religion. 
Good form has sent them all into black 
like the stroke of a funeral bell. They en- 
gage, like Mr. Gilbert's curates, in a war 
of mildness, a positive competition of ob- 
scurity. In old times the lords of the 
earth sought above all things to be dis- 



A Defence of Slang 

tinguished from each other ; with that ob- 
ject they erected outrageous images on 
their helmets and painted preposterous 
colours on their shields. They wished to 
make it entirely clear that a Norfolk was 
as different, say, from an Argyll as a white 
lion from a black pig. But to-day their 
ideal is precisely the opposite one, and if 
a Norfolk and an Argyll were dressed so 
much alike that they were mistaken for 
each other they would both go home danc- 
ing with joy. 

The consequences of this are inevitable. 
The aristocracy must lose their function 
of standing to the world for the idea of 
variety, experiment, and colour, and we 
must find these things in some other class. 
To ask whether we shall find them in the 
middle class would be to jest upon sacred 
matters. The only conclusion, therefore, 
is that it is to certain sections of the lower 
class, chiefly, for example, to omnibus-con- 

[56] 



A Defence of Slang 

ductors, with their rich and rococo mode of 
thought, that we must look for guidance 
towards liberty and light. 

The one stream of poetry which is con- 
tinually flowing is slang. Every day a 
nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of 
popular language. It may be said that the 
fashionable world talks slang as much as 
the democratic ; this is true, and it strongly 
supports the view under consideration. 
Nothing is more startling than the contrast 
between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of 
the man-about-town and the light, living, 
and flexible slang of the coster. The talk 
of the upper strata of the educated classes 
is about the most shapeless, aimless, and 
hopeless literary product that the world has 
ever seen. Clearly in this, again, the up- 
per classes have degenerated. We have 
ample evidence that the old leaders of 
feudal war could speak on occasion with a 
certain natural symbolism and eloquence 

L57] . 



A Defence of Slang 

that they had not gained from books. 
When Cyrano de Bergerac, in Rostand's 
play, throws doubts on the reality of Chris- 
tian's dullness and lack of culture, the lat- 
ter replies : 



" Bah ! on trouve des mots quand on monte k 
Tassaut ; 
Oui, j'ai un certain esprit facile et militaire ; 



and these two lines sum up a truth about 
the old oligarchs. They could not write 
three legible letters, but they could some- 
times speak literature. Douglas, when he 
hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him 
in his last battle, cried out, " Pass first, 
great heart, as thou wert ever wont." A 
Spanish nobleman, when commanded by 
the King to receive a high-placed and no- 
torious traitor, said : " I will receive him 
in all obedience, and burn down my house 
afterwards." This is literature without 

[S8] 



A Defence of Slang 

culture ; it is the speech of men convinced 
^that they have to assert proudly the poetry 
of life. 

Any one, however, who should seek for 
such pearls in the conversation of a young 
man of modern Belgravia would have much 
sorrow in his life. It is not only impossible 
for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry 
of life ; it is more impossible for them than 
for any one else. It is positively consid- 
ered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his 
ancient name, which is, when one comes 
to think of it, the only rational object of 
his existence. If a man in the street pro- 
claimed, with rude feudal rhetoric, that he 
was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be 
arrested as a lunatic ; but if it were discov- 
ered that he really was the Earl of Don- 
caster, he would simply be cut as a cad. 
No poetical prose must be expected from 
Earls as a class. The fashionable slang is 
hardly even a language ; it is like the form- 

[59] 



A Defence of Slang 

less cries of animals, dimly indicating cer- 
tain broad, well-understood states of mind. 
"Bored," "cut up," "jolly,"' "rotten," 
and so on, are like the words of some tribe 
of savages whose vocabulary has only 
twenty of them.i' If a man of fashion 
wished to protest against some solecism in 
another man of fashion, his 'itterance would 
be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless 
as a string of dead fish. But an omnibus- 
conductor (being filled with the Muse) 
would burst out into a snid literary effort : 
" You're a gen'leman, aren't yer . . . yer 
boots is a lot brighter than yer 'ed . . . 
there's precious little of yer, and that's 
clothes . . . that's right, put yer cigar in 
yer mouth 'cos I can't see yer be'ind it . . . 
take it out again, do yer ! you're young for 
smokin', but I've sent for yer mother. . . . 
Goin' ? oh, don't run away : I won't 'arm 
yer. I've got a good 'art, I 'ave. . . . 
* Down with croolty to animals,' I say,'* 

[60] 



A Defence of Slang 

and so on. It is evident that this mode of 
speech is not only literary, but literary in 
a very ornate and almost artificial sense. 
Keats never put into a sonnet so many re- 
mote metaphors as a coster puts into a 
curse ; his speech is one long allegory, like 
Spenser's *' Faerie Queen." i 

1 1 do not imagine that it is necessary to 
demonstrate that this poetic allusiveness is 
the characteristic of true slang. Such an 
expression as ** Keep your hair on " is posi- 
tively Meredithian in its perverse and mys- 
terious manner of expressing an idea. The 
Americans have a well-known expression 
about " swelled-head " as a description of 
self-approval, and the other day I heard a 
remarkable fantasia upon this air. An 
American said that after the Chinese War 
the Japanese wanted '* to put on their hats 
with a shoe-horn." This is a monument of 
the true nature of slang, which consists in 

getting further and further away from the 

[6i] 



A Defence of Slang 

original conception, in treating it more and 
more as an assumption. It is rather like 
the literary doctrine of the Symbolists. { 

The real reason of this great develop- 
ment of eloquence among the lower orders 
again brings us back to the case of the 
aristocracy in earlier times. The lower 
classes live in a state of war, a war of 
words. Their readiness is the product of 
the same fiery individualism as the readi- 
ness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any 
cabman has to be ready with his tongue, 
as any gentleman of the last century had to 
be ready with his sword. It is unfortunate 
that the poetry which is developed by this 
process should be purely a grotesque 
poetry. But as the higher orders of so- 
ciety have entirely abdicated their right to 
speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no 
wonder that the language should develop 
by itself in the direction of a rowdy elo- 
quence. The essential point is that some- 

[62] 



A Defence of Slang 

body must be at work adding new symbols 
and new circumlocutions to a language. 
/• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor 
is poetry. If we paused for a moment to 
examine the cheapest cant phrases that 
pass our lips every day, we should find that 
they were as rich and suggestive as so 
many sonnets. To take a single instance : 
we speak of a man in English social rela- 
tions ** breaking the ice." If this were ex- 
panded into a sonnet, we should have be- 
fore us a dark and sublime picture of an 
ocean of everlasting ice, the sombre and 
baffling mirror of the Northern nature, over 
which men walked and danced and skated 
easily, but under which the living waters 
roared and toiled fathoms below. The 
world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom 
of poetry, full of blue moons and white ele- 
phants, of men losing their heads, and men 
whose tongues run away with them — a 
whole chaos of fairy-tales. 

[63] 



^ DEFENCE OF HUMILITY 

THE act of defending any of the cardi- 
nal virtues has to-day all the exhilara- 
tion of a vice. Moral truisms have been 
so much disputed that they have begun to 
sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. 
And especially (in this age of egoistic 
idealism) there is about one who defends 
humility something inexpressibly rakish. 

It is no part of my intention to defend 
humility on practical grounds. Practical 
grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, 
on practical grounds the case for humility 
is overwhelming. We all know that the 
** divine glory of the ego" is socially a 
great nuisance; we all do actually value 
our friends for modesty, freshness, and 
simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the 



A Defence of Humility 

reason, we all do warmly respect humility 
— in other people. 

But the matter must go deeper than this. 
If the grounds of humility are found only 
in social convenience, they may be quite 
trivial and temporary. The egoists may 
be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation, 
agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To 
judge from the comparative lack of ease in 
their social manner, this seems a reasonable 
suggestion. 

There is one thing that must be seen at 
the outset of the, study of humility from 
an intrinsic and eternal point of view. 
The new philosophy of self-esteem and 
self-assertion declares that humility is a 
vice. If it be so, it is quite clear that it 
is one of those vices which are an integral 
part of original sin. It follows with the 
precision of clockwork every one of the 
great joys of life. No one, for example, 
was ever in love without indulging in a 

[6s] 



A Defe'nce of Humility 

positive debauch of humility. All full- 
blooded and natural people, such as school- 
boys, enjoy humility the moment they at- 
tain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said 
both by its upholders and opponents to be 
the peculiar growth of Christianity. The 
real and obvious reason of this is often 
missed. The pagans insisted upon self- 
assertion because it was the essence of 
their creed that the gods, though strong 
and just, were mystic, capricious, and even 
indifferent. But the essence of Christianity 
was in a literal sense the New Testament 
— a covenant with God which opened to 
men a clear deliverance. They thought 
themselves secure ; they claimed palaces 
of pearl and silver under the oath and seal 
of the Omnipotent; they believed them- 
selves rich with an irrevocable benediction 
which set them above the stars ; and im- 
mediately they discovered humility. It 

was only another example of the same 

[66] 



A Defence of Humility 

immutable paradox. It is always the se- 
cure who are humble. 

This particular instance survives in the 
evangelical revivalists of the street. They 
are irritating enough, but no one who has 
really studied them can deny that the irrita- 
tion is occasioned by these two things, an 
irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. 
This combination of joy and self-prostration 
is a great deal too universal to be ignored. 
If humility has been discredited as a virtue 
at the present day, it is not wholly irrelevant 
to remark that this discredit has arisen at 
the same time as a great collapse of joy in 
current literature and philosophy. Men 
have revived the splendour of Greek self- 
assertion at the same time that they have 
revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. 
A literature has arisen which commands us 
all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of 
self-sufficing deities at the same time that it 
exhibits us to ourselves as dingy maniacs 

[67] 



A Defence of Humility 

who ought to be chained up like dogs. It 
is certainly a curious state of things alto- 
gether. When we are genuinely happy, 
we think we are unworthy of happiness. 
But when we are demanding a divine 
emancipation we seem to be perfectly 
certain that we are unworthy of anything. 

The only explanation of the matter must 
be found in the conviction that humility 
has infinitely deeper roots than any modern 
men suppose; that it is a metaphysical 
and, one might almost say, a mathematical 
virtue. Probably this can best be tested 
by a study of those who frankly disregard 
humility and assert the supreme duty of 
perfecting and expressing one's self. These 
people tend, by a perfectly natural process, 
to bring their own great human gifts of 
culture, intellect, or moral power to a 
great perfection, successively shutting out 
everything that they feel to be lower than 

themselves. Now shutting out things is all 

[68] 



A Defence of Humility 

very well, but it has one simple corollary — 
that from everything that we shut out we 
are ourselves shut out. When we shut our 
door on the wind, it would be equally true 
to say that the wind shuts its door on us. 
Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really 
leads to, no one can reasonably pretend 
that it leads to knowledge. Turning a 
beggar from the door may be right enough, 
but pretending to know all the stories the 
beggar might have narrated is pure non- 
sense ; and this is practically the claim of 
the egoism which thinks that self-assertion 
can obtain knowledge. A beetle may or 
may not be inferior to a man — the matter 
awaits demonstration ; but if he were in- 
ferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact 
remains that there is probably a beetle view 
of things of which a man is entirely igno- 
rant. If he wishes to conceive that point 
of view, he will scarcely reach it by per- 
sistently revelling in the fact that he is not 

[69] 



A Defence of Humility 

a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of 
the egoistic school, Nietszche, with deadly 
and honourable logic, admitted that the 
philosophy of self-satisfaction led to- look- 
ing down upon the weak, the cowardly, and 
the ignorant. Looking down on things 
may be a delightful experience, only there 
is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, 
that is really seen when it is seen from a 
balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees 
everything, no doubt, from a high and rari- 
fied heaven ; only he sees everything fore- 
shortened or deformed. 

Now if we imagine that a man wished 
truly, as far as possible, to see everything 
as it was, he would certainly proceed on 
a different principle. He would seek to 
divest himself for a time of those personal 
peculiarities which tend to divide him from 
the thing he studies. It is as difficult, for 
example, for a man to examine a fish with- 
out developing a certain vanity in possess- 

[70] 



A Defence of Humility 

ing a pair of legs, as if they were the latest 
article of personal adornment. But if a 
fish is to be approximately understood, this 
physiological dandyism must be overcome. 
The earnest student of fish morality will, 
spiritually speaking, chop off his legs. And 
similarly the student of birds will eliminate 
his arms ; the frog-lover will with one stroke 
of the imagination remove all his teeth, and 
the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes 
and fears of jelly-fish will simplify his per- 
sonal appearance to a really alarming extent. 
It would appear, therefore, that this great 
body of ours and all its natural instincts, 
of which we are proud, and justly proud, 
is rather an encumbrance at the moment 
when we attempt to appreciate things as 
they should be appreciated. We do actually 
go through a process of mental asceticism, 
a castration of the entire being, when we 
wish to feel the abounding good in all things. 
It is «;Ood for us at certain times that our- 

[ 71 ] 



A Defence of Humility 

selves should be like a mere window — ^as 
clear, as luminous, and as invisible. 

In a very entertaining work, over which 
we have roared in childhood, it is stated 
that a point has no parts and no magnitude. 
Humility is the luxurious art of reducing 
ourselves to a point, not to a small thing 6r 
a large one, but to a thing with no size at 
all, so that to it all the cosmic things are 
what they really are — of immeasurable stat- 
ure. That the trees are high and the grasses 
short is a mere accident of our own foot- 
rules and our own stature. But to the spirit 
which has stripped off for a moment its own 
idle temporal standards the grass is an ever- 
lasting forest, with dragons for denizens ; 
the stones of the road are as incredible 
mountains piled one upon the other; the 
dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illu- 
minating the lands around ; and the hea^h- 
bells on their stalks are like planets huLg 
in heaven each higher than the other. L " 

[72] 



I 



A Defence of Humility 

tween one stake of a paling and another 
there are new and terrible landscapes ; 
here a desert, with nothing but one mis- 
shapen rock; here a miraculous forest, of 
which all the trees flower above the head 
with the hues of sunset ; here, again, a sea 
full of monsters that Dante would not have 
dared to dream. These are the visions of 
him who, like the child in the fairy-tales, is 
not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the 
sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition 
is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, 
which only means that the stars are becom- 
ing smaller and smaller. World after world 
falls from him into insignificance ; the whole 
passionate and intricate life of common 
things becomes as lost to him as is the life 
of the infusoria to a man without a micro- 
scope. He rises always through desolate 
eternities. He may find new systems, and 
forget them ; he may discover fresh uni- 
verses, and learn to despise them. But the 

[73] 



A Defence of Humility 

towering and tropical vision of things as 
they really are — the gigantic daisies, the 
heaven-consuming dandelions, the great 
Odyssey of strange-coloured oceans and 
strange-shaped trees, of dust like the 
wreck of temples, and thistledown like 
the ruin of stars — all this colossal vision 
shall perish with the last of the humble. 



[74] 



A DEFENCE OF PENNY 
DREADFULS 

ONE of the strangest examples of the 
degree to which ordinary life is un- 
dervalued is the example of popular litera- 
ture, the vast mass of which we contentedly 
describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette 
may be ignorant in a literary sense, which 
is only like saying that a modern novel is 
ignorant in the chemical sense, or the eco- 
nomic sense, or the astronomical sense ; but 
it is not vulgar intrinsically — it is the actual 
centre of a million flaming imaginations. 

In former centuries the educated class 
ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They 
ignored, and therefore did not, properly 
speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and 
indifference does not inflate the character 
with pride. A man does not walk down 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

the street giving a haughty twirl to his 
moustaches at the thought of his superiority 
to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The 
old scholars left the whole underworld of 
popular compositions in a similar dark- 
ness. 

To-day, however, we have reversed this 
principle. We do despise vulgar composi- 
tions, and we do not ignore them. We are 
in some danger of becoming petty in our 
study of pettiness ; there is a terrible Cir- 
cean law in the background that if the soul 
stoops too ostentatiously to examine any- 
thing it never gets up again. There is no 
class of vulgar publications about which 
there is, to my mind, more utterly ridicu- 
lous exaggeration and misconception than 
the current boys' literature of the lowest 
stratum. This class of composition has 
presumably always existed, and must exist. 
It has no more claim to be good literature 
than the daily conversation of its readers to 

[76] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and 
tenements they inhabit to be sublime archi- 
tecture. But people must have conversa- 
tion, they must have houses, and they must 
have stories. The simple need for some 
kind of ideal world in which fictitious per- 
sons play an unhampered part is infinitely 
deeper and older than the rules of good art, 
and much more important. Every one of 
us in childhood has constructed such an 
invisible dramatis personcv, but it never oc- 
curred to our nurses to correct the compo- 
sition by careful comparison with Balzac. 
In the East the professional story-teller 
goes from village to village with a small 
carpet ; and I wish sincerely that any one 
had the moral courage to spread that carpet 
and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is 
not probable that all the tales of the carpet- 
bearer are little gems of original artistic 
workmanship. Literature and fiction are 
two entirely different things. Literature is- 

[77] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

a luxury ; fiction is a necessity. A work 
of art can hardly be too short, for its climax 
is its merit. A story can never be too long, 
for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, 
like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight. 
And so, while the increase of the artistic 
conscience tends in more ambitious works 
to brevity and impressionism, voluminous 
industry still marks the producer of the true 
romantic trash. There was no end to the 
ballads of Robin Hood ; there is no end to 
the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the 
Avenging Nine. These two heroes are de- 
liberately conceived as immortal. 

But instead of basing all discussion of the 
problem upon the common-sense recogni- 
tion of this fact — that the youth of the 
lower orders always has had and always 
must have formless and endless romantic 
reading of some kind, and then going on 
to make provision for its wholesomeness — 
we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic 

[78] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

abuse of this reading as a whole and indig- 
nant surprise that the errand-boys under 
discussion do not read "The Egoist," and 
" The Master Builder." It is the cus- 
tom, particularly among magistrates, to at- 
tribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to 
cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs 
away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly 
points out that the child's knowledge that 
apples appease hunger is traceable to some 
curious literary researches. The boys 
themselves, when penitent, frequently ac- 
cuse the novelettes with great bitterness, 
which is only to be expected from young 
people possessed of no little native humour. 
If I had forged a will, and could obtain 
sympathy by tracing the incident to the in- 
fluence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I 
should find the greatest entertainment in 
the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly 
fixed in the minds of most people that 
gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the 

[79] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

community, find their principal motives for 
conduct in printed books. 

Now it is quite clear that this objection, 
the objection brought by magistrates, has 
nothing to do with literary merit. Bad 
story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall 
Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot 
be put in prison for an anticlimax. The 
objection rests upon the theory that the 
tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is 
criminal and degraded, appealing to low 
cupidity and low cruelty. This is the mag- 
isterial theory, and this is rubbish. 

So far as I have seen them, in connection 
with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest 
districts, the facts are simply these : The 
whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile 
literature is concerned with adventures, 
rambling, disconnected and endless. It 
does not express any passion of any sort, 
for there is no human character of any sort. 
It runs eternally in certain grooves of local 

[80] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

and historical type : the medieval knight, the 
eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern 
cowboy, recur with the same stiff sim- 
plicity as the conventional human figures in 
an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily 
imagine a human being kindling wild appe- 
tites by the contemplation of his Turkey 
carpet as by such dehumanized and naked 
narrative as this. 

Among these stories there are a certain 
number which deal sympathetically with 
the adventures of robbers, outlaws and 
pirates, which present in a dignified and ro- 
mantic light thieves and murderers like 
Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That 
is to say, they do precisely the same 
thing as Scott's " Ivanhoe," Scott's " Rob 
Roy," Scott's '' Lady of the Lake," Byron's 
** Corsair," Wordsworth's '* Rob Roy's 
Grave," Stevenson's '' Macaire," Mr. Max 
Pemberton's " Iron Pirate," and a thousand 

more works distributed systematically as 

[8i] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody 
imagines that an admiration of Locksley in 
" Ivanhoe" will lead a boy to shoot Jap- 
anese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park ; 
no one thinks that the incautious opening 
of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy 
will set him up for life as a blackmailer. 
In the case of our own class, we recognize 
that this wild life is contemplated with 
pleasure by the young, not because it is 
like their own life, but because it is dif- 
ferent from it. It might at least cross our 
minds that, for whatever other reason the 
errand-boy reads " The Red Revenge," it 
really is not because he is dripping with the 
gore of his own friends and relatives. 

In this matter, as in all such matters, we 
lose our bearings entirely by speaking of 
the "lower classes" when we mean hu- 
manity minus ourselves. This trivial ro- 
mantic literature is not especially plebeian : 
it is simply human. The philanthropist can 

[82] 



A Defen.ce of Penny Dreadfuls 

never forget classes and callings. He says, 
with a modest swagger, " I have invited 
twenty-five factory hands to tea." If he 
said, " I have invited twenty-five chartered 
accountants to tea," every one would see 
the humour of so simple a classification. 
But this is what we have done with this 
lumberland of foolish writing : we have 
probed, as if it were some monstrous new 
disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the 
foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary 
men will always be sentimentalists : for a 
sentimentalist is simply a man who has 
feelings and does not trouble to invent a 
new way of expressing them. These com- 
mon and current publications have nothing 
essentially evil about them. They express 
the sanguine and heroic truisms on which 
civilization is built ; for it is clear that un- 
less civilization is built on truisms, it is not 
built at all. Clearly, there could be no 
safety for a society in which the remark by 

[83] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

the Chief Justice that murder was wrong 
was regarded as an original and dazzling 
epigram. 

If the authors and publishers of '* Dick 
Deadshot," and such remarkable works 
were suddenly to make a raid upon the 
educated class, were to take down the 
names of every man, however distinguished, 
who was caught at a University Extension 
Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels 
and warn us all to correct our lives, we 
should be seriously annoyed. Yet they 
have far more right to do so than we ; for 
they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and 
we are abnormal. It is the modern litera- 
ture of the educated, not of the uneducated, 
which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. 
Books recommending profligacy and pessi- 
mism, at which the high-souled errand-boy 
would shudder, lie upon all our drawing- 
room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of 
the dirtiest old book-stall in Whitechapel 

[84] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

dared to display works really recommend- 
ing polygamy or suicide, his stock would be 
seized by the police. These things are our 
luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludi- 
crous as to be almost unparalleled in history, 
we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality 
at the very time that we are discussing (with 
equivocal German Professors) whether mo- 
rality is valid at all. At the very instant that 
we curse the Penny Dreadful for encour- 
aging thefts upon property, we canvass the 
proposition that all property is theft. At the 
very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of 
lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully 
reading philosophies which glory in lubricity 
and indecency. At the very instant that we 
charge it with encouraging the young to 
destroy life, we are placidly discussing 
whether life is worth preserving. 

But it is we who are the morbid excep- 
tions ; it is we who are the criminal class. 
This should be our great comfort. The 

[8s] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass 
of idle books and idle words, have never 
doubted and never will doubt that courage 
is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that dis- 
tressed ladies should be rescued, and van- 
quished enemies spared. There are a large 
number of cultivated persons who doubt 
these maxims of daily life, just as there are 
a large number of persons who believe they 
are the Prince of Wales ; and I am told 
that both classes of people are entertaining 
conversationalists. But the average man or 
boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries 
of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, 
a plainer and better gospel than any of 
those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the 
fashionable change as often as their bonnets. 
It may be a very limited aim in morality to 
shoot a " many-faced and fickle traitor," 
but at least it is a better aim than to be a 
many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a 

simple summary of a good many modern 

[86] 



A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls 

systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. 
So long as the coarse and thin texture 
of mere current popular romance is not 
touched by a paltry culture it will never be 
vitally immoral. It is always on the side 
of life. The poor — the slaves who really 
stoop under the burden of life — have often 
been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but 
never hopeless. That is a class privilege, 
like cigars. Their drivelling literature will 
always be a ** blood and thunder" litera- 
ture, as simple as the thunder of heaven 
and the blood of men. 



[87] 



MAETERLINCK 

THE selection of *' Thoughts from 
Maeterlinck" is a very creditable 
and also a very useful compilation. Many 
modern critics object to the hacking and 
hewing of a consistent writer which is 
necessary for this kind of work, but upon 
more serious consideration, the view is not 
altogether adequate. Maeterlinck is a very 
great man ; and in the long run this process 
of mutilation has happened to all great men. 
It was the mark of a great patriot to be 
drawn and quartered and his head set on 
one spike in one city and his left leg on an- 
other spike in another city. It was the 
mark of a saint that even these fragments 
began to work miracles. So it has been 
with all the very great men of the world. 
However careless, however botchy, may 



Maeterlinck 

be the version of Maeterlinck or of any 
one else given in such a selection as this, it 
is assuredly far less careless and far less 
botchy than the version, the parody, the 
wild misrepresentation of Maeterlinck 
which future ages will hear and distant 
critics be called upon to consider. 

No one can feel any reasonable doubt 
that we have heard about Christ and Soc- 
rates and Buddha and St. Francis a mere 
chaos of excerpts, a mere book of quota- 
tions. But from those fragmentary epi- 
grams we can deduce greatness as clearly 
as we can deduce Venus from the torso of 
Venus or Hercules ex pede Herculem. If 
we knew nothing else about the Founder 
of Christianity, for example, beyond the 
fact that a religious teacher lived in a re- 
mote country, and in the course of His 
peregrinations and proclamations consist- 
ently called Himself "the Son of Man," 
we should know by that alone that He was 

[89] 



Maeterlinck 

a man of almost immeasurable greatness. 
If future ages happened to record nothing 
else about Socrates except that he owned 
his title to be the wisest of men because he 
knew that he knew nothing, they would be 
able to deduce from that the height and 
energy of his civilization, the glory that was 
Greece. The credit of such random com- 
pilations as that which " E. S. S." and Mr. 
George Allen have just effected is quite se- 
cure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal edi- 
tions, the complete works of this author or 
that author which are forgotten. It is such 
books as this that have revolutionized the 
destiny of the world. Great things like 
Christianity or Platonism have never been 
founded upon consistent editions ; all of 
them have been founded upon scrap-books. 
The position of Maeterlinck in modern 
life is a thing too obvious to be easily de- 
termined in words. It is, perhaps, best 
expressed by saying that it is the great 

[90] 



Maeterlinck 

glorification of the inside of things at the 
expense of the outside. There is one great 
evil in modern life for which nobody has 
found even approximately a tolerable de- 
scription : I can only invent a word and 
call it " remotism." It is the tendency to 
think first of things which, as a matter of 
fact, lie far away from the actual centre of 
human experience. Thus people say, " All 
our knowledge of life begins with the 
amoeba." It is false ; our knowledge of 
life begins with ourselves. Thus they say 
that the British Empire is glorious, and at 
the very word Empire they think at once 
of Australia and New Zealand, and Canada, 
and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, 
and it never occurs to any one of them to 
think of the Surrey Hills. The one real 
struggle in modern life is the struggle be- 
tween the man like Maeterlinck, who sees 
the inside as the truth, and the man like 
Zola, who sees the outside as the truth. A 

[91] 



Maeterlinck 

hundred cases might be given. We may 
take, for the sake of argument, the case of 
what is called falling in love. The sincere 
realist, the man who believes in a certain 
finality in physical science, says, '* You 
may, if you like, describe this thing as a 
divine and sacred and incredible vision ; 
that is your sentimental theory about it. 
But what it is is an animal and sexual in- 
stinct designed for certain natural pur- 
poses." The man on the other side, the 
idealist, replies, with quite equal confi- 
dence, that this is the very reverse of the 
truth. I put it as it has always struck me ; 
he replies, ^* Not at all. You ma,y, if you 
like, describe this thing as an animal and 
sexual instinct, designed for certain natural 
purposes ; that is your philosophical or 
zoological theory about it. What it is, be- 
yond all doubt of any kind, is a divine and 
sacred and incredible vision." The fact 
that it is an animal necessity only comes to 

[92] 



Maeterlinck 

the naturalistic philosopher after looking 
abroad, studying its origins and results, 
constructing an explanation of its existence, 
more or less natural and conclusive. The 
fact that it is a spiritual triumph comes to 
the first errand boy who happens to feel it. 
If a lad of seventeen falls in love and is 
struck dead by a hansom cab an hour after- 
wards, he has known the thing as it is, a 
spiritual ecstasy ; he has never come to 
trouble about the thing as it may be, a 
physical destiny. If any one says that fall- 
ing in love is an animal thing, the answer is 
very simple. The only way of testing the 
matter is to ask those who are experienc- 
ing it, and none of those would admit for a 
moment that it was an animal thing. 

Maeterlinck's appearance in Europe 
means primarily this subjective intensity ; 
by this the materialism is not overthrown : 
materialism is undermined. He brings, 
not something which is more poetic than 

[93] 



Maeterlinck 

realism, not something which is more spir- 
itual than realism, not something which is 
more right than realism, but something 
which is more real than realism. He dis- 
covers the one indestructible thing. This 
material world on which such vast systems 
have been superimposed — this may mean 
anything. It may be a dream, it may be a 
joke, it may be a trap or temptation, it may 
be a charade, it may be the beatific vision : 
the only thing of which we are certain is 
this human soul. This human soul finds 
itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the 
grass. It has brought forth poetry and re- 
ligion in order to explain matters ; it will 
bring them forth again. It matters not one 
atom how often the lulls of materialism and 
scepticism occur ; they are always broken 
by the reappearance of a fanatic. They 
have come in our time : they have been 
broken by Maeterlinck. 

[94] 



ON LYING IN BED 

LYING in bed would be an altogether 
perfect and supreme experience if 
only one had a coloured pencil long enough 
to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is 
not generally a part of the domestic appa- 
ratus on the premises. I think myself that 
the thing might be managed with several 
pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one 
worked in a really sweeping and masterly 
way, and laid on the colour in great washes, 
it might drip down again on one's face in 
floods of rich and mingled colour like some 
strange fairy-rain ; and that would have its 
disadvantages. I am afraid itwould be neces- 
sary to stick to black and white in this form 
of artistic composition. To that purpose, 
indeed, the white ceiling would be of the 
greatest possible use ; in fact it is the only 
use I think of a white ceiling being put to. 



On Lying in Bed 

But for the beautiful experiment of lying 
in bed I might never have discovered it. 
For years I have been looking for some 
blank spaces in a modern house to draw on. 
Paper is much too small for any really alle- 
gorical design ; as Cyrano de Bergerac 
says: " II me faut des grants." But when 
I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the 
modern rooms such as we all live in I was 
continually disappointed. I found an end- 
less pattern and complication of small 
objects hung like a curtain of fine links be- 
tween me and my desire. I examined the 
walls ; I found them to my surprise to be 
already covered with wall-paper, and I 
found the wall-paper to be already covered 
with very uninteresting images, all bearing 
a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I 
could not understand why one arbitrary 
symbol (a symbol apparently entirely de- 
void of any religious or philosophical sig- 
nificance) should thus be sprinkled all over 

[96] 



On Lying in Bed 

my nice walls like a sort of smallpox. The 
Bible must be referring to wall-papers, I 
think, when it says, "Use not vain repeti- 
tions, as the Gentiles do." I found the 
Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours, 
rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the 
sweetmeat called Turkish delight. I do 
not exactly know what Turkish delight 
really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian 
Massacres. Everywhere that I went for- 
lornly, with my pencil or my paint brush, I 
found that others had unaccountably been 
before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, 
and the furniture with their childish and 
barbaric designs. 

***** 

Nowhere did I find a really clear place 
for sketching until this occasion when I 
prolonged beyond the proper limit the 
process of lying on my back in bed. Then 
the light of that white heaven broke upon 
my vision, that breadth of mere white which 

[97] 



On Lying in Bed 

is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, 
since it means purity and also means free- 
dom. But alas 1 like all heavens, now that 
it is seen it is found to be unattainable ; it 
looks more austere and more distant than 
the blue sky outside the window. For my 
proposal to paint on it with the bristly end 
of a broom has been discouraged — never 
mind by whom ; by a person debarred from 
all political rights — and even my minor 
proposal to put the other end of the broom 
into the kitchen fire and turn it into char- 
coal has not been conceded. Yet I am 
certain that it was from persons in my po- 
sition that all the original inspiration came 
for covering the ceilings of palaces and 
cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or 
victorious gods. I am sure that it was only 
because Michael Angelo was engaged in 
the ancient and honourable occupation of 
lying in bed that he ever realized how the 
roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made 

[98] 



On Lying in Bed 

into an awful imitation of a divine drama 
that could only be acted in the heavens. 

•The tone nov\r commonly taken towards 
the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical 
and unhealthy. Of all the marks of mod- 
ernity that seem to mean a kind of deca- 
dence, there is none more menacing and 
dangerous than the exultation of very small 
and secondary matters of conduct at the 
expense of very great and primary ones, at 
the expense of eternal public and tragic 
human morality. If there is one thing 
worse than the modern weakening of major 
morals it is the modern strengthening of 
minor morals. Thus it is considered more 
withering to accuse a man of bad taste than 
of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to 
godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made 
an essential and godliness is regarded as an 
offence. A playwright can attack the insti- 
tution of marriage so long as he does not 
misrepresent the manners of society, and I 



On Lying in Bed 

have met Ibsenite pessimists who thought 
it wrong to take beer but right to take 
prussic acid. Especially this is so in mat- 
ters of hygiene ; notably such matters as 
lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, 
as it ought to be, as a matter of personal 
convenience and adjustment, it has come to 
be regarded by many as if it were a part of 
essential morals to get up early in the morn- 
ing. It is upon the whole part of practical 
wisdom ; but there is nothing good about 

it or bad about its opposite. 

* * * * * 

Misers get up early in the morning; and 
burglars, I am informed, get up the night 
before. It is the great peril of our society 
that all its mechanism may grow more fixed 
while its spirit grows more fickle. A man's 
minor actions and arrangements ought to 
be free, flexible, creative ; the things that 
should be unchangeable are his principles, 
his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; 

[ lOO ] 



On Lying in Bed 

our views change constantly; but our lunch 
does not change. Now, I should like men 
to have strong and rooted conceptions, 
but as for their lunch, let them have it 
sometimes in the garden, sometimes in 
bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in 
the top of a tree. Let them argue from 
the same first principles, but let them 
do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. 
This alarming growth of good habits really 
means a too great emphasis on those virtues 
which mere custom can misuse, it means 
too little emphasis on those virtues which 
custom can never quite ensure, sudden and 
splendid virtues of inspired pity or of in- 
spired candour. If ever that abrupt appeal 
is made to us we may fail. A man can get 
used to getting up at five o'clock in the 
morning. A man cannot very well get used 
to being burned for his opinions ; the first 
experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay 
a little more attention to these possibilities 

[lOl] 



On Lying in Bed 

of the heroic and the unexpected. I dare 
say that when I get out of this bed I shall 
do some deed of an almost terrible virtue. 

For those who study the great art of 
lying in bed there is one emphatic caution 
to be added. Even for those who can do 
their work in bed (like journalists), still 
more for those whose work cannot be done 
in bed (as, for example, the professional 
harpooner of whales), it is obvious that the 
indulgence must be very occasional. But 
that is not the caution I mean. The caution 
is this : if you do lie in bed, be sure you do 
it without any reason or justification at all. 
I do not speak, of course, of the seriously 
sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let 
him do it without a rag of excuse ; then he 
will get up a healthy man. If he does it 
for some secondary hygienic reason, if he 
has some scientific explanation, he may get 
up a hypochondriac. 

[102] 



THE LITTLE BIRDS WHO WONT 

SING 

ON my last morning on the Flemish 
coast, when I knew that in a few 
hours I should be in England, my eye fell 
upon one of the details of Gothic carving 
of which Flanders is full. I do not know 
whether the thing was old, though it was 
certainly knocked about and indecipher- 
able, but at least it was certainly in the 
style and tradition of the early Middle 
Ages. It seemed to represent men bend- 
ing themselves (not to say twisting them- 
selves) to certain primary employments. 
Some seemed to be sailors tugging at 
ropes ; others, I think, were reaping ; 
others were energetically pouring some- 
thing into something else. This is entirely 
characteristic of the pictures and carvings 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

of the early thirteenth century, perhaps the 
most purely vigorous time in all history. 
The great Greeks preferred to carve their 
gods and heroes doing nothing. Splendid 
and philosophic as their composure is there 
is always about it something that marks the 
master of many slaves. But if there was 
one thing the early medisevals liked it was 
representing people doing something — 
hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or 
treading grapes, or making shoes, or cook- 
ing something in a pot. '* Quicquid agunt 
homines, votum, timor, ira voluptas." (I 
quote from memory.) The Middle Ages 
is full of that spirit in all its monuments 
and manuscripts. Chaucer retains it in his 
jolly insistence on everybody's type of trade 
and toil. It was the earliest and youngest 
resurrection of Europe, the time when 
social order was strengthening, but had not 
yet become oppressive ; the time when re- 
ligious faiths were strong, but had not yet 

[104] 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

been exasperated. For this reason the 
whole effect of Greek and Gothic carving 
is different. The figures in the Elgin 
marbles, though often reining their steeds 
for an instant in the air, seem frozen for- 
ever at that perfect instant. But a mass of 
mediaeval carving seems actually a sort of 
bustle or hubbub in stone. Sometimes one 
cannot help feeling that the groups actually 
move and mix, and the whole front of a 

great cathedral has the hum of a huge hive. 
***** 

But about these particular figures there 
was a peculiarity of which I could not be 
sure. Those of them that had any heads 
had very curious heads, and it seemed to 
me that they had their mouths open. 
Whether or no this really meant anything 
or was an accident of nascent art I do not 
know ; but in the course of wondering I 
recalled to my mind the fact that singing 
was connected with many of the tasks 
[i°S] 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

there suggested, that there were songs for 
reapers reaping and songs for sailors haul- 
ing ropes. I was still thinking about this 
small problem when I walked along the 
pier at Ostend ; and I heard some sailors 
uttering a measured shout as they laboured, 
and I remembered that sailors still sing in 
chorus while they work, and even sing dif- 
ferent songs according to what part of their 
work they are doing. And a little while 
afterwards, when my sea journey was over, 
the sight of men working in the English 
fields reminded me again that there are still 
songs for harvest and for many agricultural 
routines. And I suddenly wondered why 
if this were so it should be quite unknown 
for any modern trade to have a ritual 
poetry. How did people come to chant 
rude poems while pulling certain ropes or 
gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody 
do anything of the kind while producing 

any of the modern things ? Why is a 

[io6] 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

modern newspaper never printed by people 
singing in chorus ? Why do shopmen sel- 
I' dom, if ever, sing? 



If reapers sing while reaping, why should 
not auditors sing while auditing and bank- 
ers while banking ? If there are songs for 
all the separate things that have to be done 
in a boat, why are there not songs for all 
the separate things that have to be done in 
a bank ? As the train from Dover flew 
through the Kentish gardens, I tried to 
write a few songs suitable for commercial 
gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerks 
when casting up columns might begin with 
a thundering chorus in praise of Simple 
Addition. 



" Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are 
o'er. 
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting : ' Two and 
Two are four.' 

[ 107 ] 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though 
the sophists roar, 
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two 
and Two are four. 

" There's a run upon the Bank — 
Stand away ! 
For the Manager's a crank and the Secretary 
drank, and the Upper Tooting Bank 
Turns to bay ! 
Stand close : there is a run 

On the Bank. 
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend 
run, that she fired with every gun 
Ere she sank." 



And as I came into the cloud of London 
I met a friend of mine who actually is in a 
bank, and submitted these suggestions in 
rhyme to him for use among his colleagues. 
But he was not very hopeful about the mat- 
ter. It was not (he assured me) that he 
underrated the verses, or in any sense la- 
mented their lack of polish. No ; it was 

rather, he felt, an indefinable something in 

[io8] 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

the very atmosphere of the society in which 
we live that makes it spiritually difficult to 
sing in banks. And I think he must be 
right ; though the matter is very mysterious. 
I may observe here that I think there must 
be some mistake in the calculations of the 
Socialists. They put down all our distress, 
not to a moral tone, but to the chaos of 
private enterprise. Now, banks are pri- 
vate ; but post-offices are Socialistic : there- 
fore I naturally expected that the post-office 
would fall into the collectivist idea of a 
chorus. Judge of my surprise when the 
lady in my local post-office (whom I urged 
to sing) dismissed the idea with far more 
coldness than the bank clerk had done. 
She seemed, indeed, to be in a consider- 
ably greater state of depression than he. 
Should any one suppose that this was the 
effect of the verses themselves, it is only 
fair to say that the specimen verse of the 

Post-Office Hymn ran thus : 

[109] 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

" O'er London our letters are shaken like snow, 
Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go. 
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark, 
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park." 

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy) : 
" Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park." 

And the more I thought about the matter 
the more painfully certain it seemed that 
the most important and typical modern 
things could not be done with a chorus. 
One could not, for instance, be a great 
financier and sing ; because the essence of 
being a great financier is that you keep 
quiet. You could not even in many 
modern circles be a public man and sing ; 
because in those circles the essence of be- 
ing a public man is that you do nearly 
everything in private. Nobody would im- 
agine a chorus of money-lenders. Every 
one knows the story of the solicitors' corps 
of volunteers who, when the Colonel on the 

battle-field cried, '* Charge ! " all said simul- 

[no J 



The Little Birds Who Won't Sing 

taneously, " Six-and-eightpence." Men 
can sing while charging in a military, but 
hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of 
my reflections I had really got no further 
than the subconscious feeling of my friend 
the bank clerk — that there is something 
spiritually suffocating about our life ; not 
about our laws merely, but about our life. 
Bank clerks are without songs, not because 
they are poor, but because they are sad. 
Sailors are much poorer. As I passed 
homewards I passed a little tin building of 
some religious sort, which was shaken with 
shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own 
tongue. They were singing anyhow ; and 
I had for an instant a fancy I had often had 
before : that with us the superhuman is the 
only place where you can find the human. 
Human nature is hunted, and has fled into 
sanctuary. 



[Ill] 



A TRAGEDY OF TWOPENCE 

MY relations with the readers of this 
page have been long and pleasant, 
but — perhaps for that very reason — I feel 
that the time has come when I ought to 
confess the one great crime of my life. It 
happened a long time ago ; but it is not 
uncommon for a belated burst of remorse 
to reveal such dark episodes long after they 
have occurred. It has nothing to do with 
the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League. 
That body is so offensively respectable that 
a newspaper, in describing it the other day, 
referred to my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson as 
Canon Edgar Jepson ; and it is believed 
that similar titles are intended for all of us. 
No ; it is not by the conduct of Archbishop 
Crane, of Dean Chesterton, of the Rev. 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

James Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and 
even of that fine and virile old ecclesiastic. 
Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish (or rather, am 
driven by my conscience) to make this 
declaration. The crime was committed in 
solitude and without accomplices. Alone I 
did it. Let me, with the characteristic 
thirst of penitents to get the worst of the 
confession over, state it first of all in 
its most dreadful and indefensible form. 
There is at the present moment, in a town 
in Germany (unless he has died of rage on 
discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper 
to whom I still owe twopence. I last left 
his open-air restaurant knowing that I owed 
him twopence. I carried it away under his 
nose, despite the fact that the nose was a 
decidedly Jewish one. I have never paid 
him, and it is highly improbable that I ever 
shall. How did this villainy come to occur 
in a life which has been, generally speaking, 
deficient in the dexterity necessary for 

["3] 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

fraud? The story is as follows — and it has 
a moral, though there may not be room for 
that. 



It is a fair general rule for those travel- 
ling on the Continent that the easiest way 
of talking in a foreign language is to talk 
philosophy. The most difficult kind of 
talking is to talk about common necessities. 
The reason is obvious. The names of 
common necessities vary completely with 
each nation and are generally somewhat odd 
and quaint. How, for instance, could a 
Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would 
be called a ** scuttle"? It he has ever 
seen the word scuttle it has been in the 
Jingo Press, where the " policy of scuttle " 
is used whenever we give up something to 
a small Power like Liberals, instead of giv- 
ing up everything to a great Power like 
Imperialists. What Englishman in Ger- 
["4] 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

many would be poet enough to guess that 
the Germans call a glove a " hand-shoe" ? 
Nations name their necessities by nick- 
names, so to speak. They call their tubs 
and stools by quaint, elvish, and almost 
affectionate names, as if they were their 
own children 1 But any one can argue 
about abstract things in a foreign language 
who has ever got as far Exercise IV. in a 
primer. For as soon as he can put a sen- 
tence together at all he finds that the words 
used in abstract or philosophical discussions 
are almost the same in all nations. They 
are the same, for the simple reason that 
they all come from the things that were the 
roots of our common civilization. From 
Christianity, from the Roman Empire, from 
the mediaeval Church, or the French Revo- 
lution. '^ Nation," '' citizen," " religion," 
"philosophy," "authority," "the Repub- 
lic," words like these are nearly the same in 
all the countries in which we travel. Re- 
["S] 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

strain, therefore, your exuberant admiration 
for the young man who can argue with six 
French atheists when he first lands at 
Dieppe. Even I can do that. But very 
likely the same young man does not know 
the French for a shoe-horn. But to this 
generalization there are three great excep- 
tions, (i) In the case of countries that are 
not European at all, and have never had our 
civic conceptions, or the old Latin scholar- 
ship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian 
phrase for "citizenship" at once leaps to 
the mind, or that a Dyak's word for " the 
Republic " has been familiar to me from 
the nursery. (2) In the case of Germany, 
where, although the principle does apply 
to many words such as *' nation " and " phi- 
losophy," it does not apply so generally, 
because Germany has had a special and de- 
liberate policy of encouraging the purely 
German part of its language. (3) In the 
case where one does not know any of the 

["6] 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

language at all, as is generally the case 

with me. 

***** 

Such at least was my situation on the 
dark day on which I committed my crime. 
Two of the exceptional conditions which I 
have mentioned were combined. I was 
walking about a German town, and I knew 
no German. I knew, however, two or 
three of those great and solemn words 
which hold our European civilization to- 
gether — one of which is "cigar." As it 
was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a 
table in a sort of beer-garden, and ordered 
a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the 
lager, and paid for it. I smoked the cigar, 
forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gaz- 
ing rapturously at the royal outline of the 
Taunus mountains. After about ten min- 
utes, I suddenly remembered that I had not 
paid for the cigar. I went back to the place 
of refreshment, and put down the money. 

["7] 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

But the proprietor also had forgotten the 
cigar, and he merely said guttural things 
in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, 
what I wanted. I said "cigar," and he gave 
me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting 
down the money to wave away the cigar 
with gestures of refusal. He thought that 
my rejection was of the nature of a con- 
demnation of that particular cigar, and 
brought me another. I whirled my arms 
like a windmill, seeking to convey by the 
sweeping universality of my gesture that my 
rejection was a rejection of cigars in 
general, not of that particular article. He 
mistook this for the ordinary impatience of 
common men, and rushed forward, his 
hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, press- 
ing them upon me. In desperation I tried 
other kinds of pantomime, but the more 
cigars I refused the more and more rare 
and precious cigars were brought out of 

the deeps and recesses of the establish- 

[n8] 



A Tragedy of Twopence 

ment. I tried in vain to think of a way of 
conveying to him the fact that I had already 
had the cigar. I imitated the action of a 
citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing 
away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only 
thought I was rehearsing (as in an ecstasy 
of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he was 
going to give me. At last I retired baffled : 
he would not take the money and leave the 
cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper 
(in whose face a love of money shone like 
the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly re- 
fused to receive the twopence that I cer- 
tainly owed him ; and I took that twopence 
of his away with me and rioted on it for 
months. I hope that on the last day the 
angels will break the truth very gently to 
that unhappy man. 

***** 

This is the true and exact account of the 
Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is 
this — that civilization is founded upon ab- 

["9] 



KT 30 1911 **<r 

A Tragedy of Twopence 

stractions. The idea of debt is one which 
cannot be conveyed by physical motions at 
all, because it is an abstract idea. And civi- 
lization obviously would be nothing without 
debt. So when hard-headed fellows who 
study scientific sociology (which does not 
exist) come and tell you that civilization is 
material or indifferent to the abstract, just 
ask yourselves how many of the things that 
make up our Society, the Law, or the 
Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, 
you would be able to convey with your face 
and your ten fingers by grinning and ges- 
ticulating to a German innkeeper. 



[120] 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





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